by Jia Jiang
I was getting a headache thinking about all this. To distract myself, I turned on my laptop and opened my e-mail box. There were more than one thousand unread messages waiting for me. Ever since the donut video had gone viral, my in-box had been brimming with “fan e-mails” from people all over the world. Some of them were light and funny, written by people who found my videos pretty amusing. Many of them—most, actually—were from people who had been taking the videos very seriously, using them as a way to gain courage to face their own rejection fears.
Like this e-mail from Mike:
I have been following your 100 Days of Rejection Therapy almost from the beginning when my daughter sent me a link. Your journey has brought me many smiles, laughs, and strength. It is the strength that I have gained in my day to day activities that I want to thank you most for. Through my life, I have always found it difficult to approach people and ask the simplest questions, even of people whose job it is to help, like store clerks, wait staff, etc. At times I have even sent my children to ask for ketchup at McDonald’s because the thought made my stomach knot up….
This newfound strength has come at a very crucial time in my life. In May of last year, my wife was diagnosed with cancer and it has taken eight months of doctor and hospital visits to arrive at a final cancer type diagnosis. We have learned much about the inner workings of the healthcare system, both the good and the bad, and it all requires talking to many people and asking many questions. Every time I felt the fear of asking questions on our cancer journey, I thought of you and found the strength to step up and do what had to be done. Thanks so much for taking your journey and letting us all share and gain strength from your actions.
And this one from Regina:
I am an actress working both out of NYC and Philadelphia and I really find this project fascinating because as an actor, we see more rejection in our work than most people. Every audition is like another job interview and the biggest fear is not booking that job or being rejected because someone else is “better.” It is very easy to get discouraged and take it to heart. And in simple day to day scenarios, asking for simple things can make me break out in a sweat. I find while watching some of your videos on YouTube that I am squirming along with you, having to approach people and make a simple request.
In everyday situations for myself, the consequences conjured up by my imagination are far worse than what I think most outcomes will realistically be. Will someone yell at me, or ridicule me, call me stupid, or throw me out of their establishment? At an audition, will the casting director stop me mid-performance and tell me I have no talent and that the school that gave me my MFA in Acting should not have given me a diploma? My mind has some of the craziest ideas of potential outcomes. And it is this fear of being rejected that can paralyze people and keep them from really living…. I cannot wait to see what other adventures you have. I think you are learning a lot about rejection but even more importantly, about how generous people can be and the beauty of the human spirit. I know I am learning so much by watching your project and about staying positive. Good luck!
It’s one thing to receive a few letters like this. But I’d been getting hundreds of them—all from people who seemed just as invested in my rejection journey as I was. I felt humbled by their stories and honored to be helping them in some way to face down their fears. But I was also amazed: Was I really impacting the lives of people I didn’t know just by doing what I was doing?
The media had come after me because of the entertainment value I could provide for them. “Guy seeks out rejection but receives Olympic donuts instead” was perfect story-of-the-day material. But the e-mails I was receiving from regular people—people just like me—were different. They didn’t see my journey as entertainment. It was almost as if they saw me as representing them in some sort of struggle and had a personal stake in seeing me succeed.
I’d always viewed my fear of rejection as some sort of rare disease, like guinea worm, that inflicts terrible pain but affects only a tiny segment of the overall population. I figured that I was simply unlucky, or that my innate shyness, my upbringing in a superprotective family, or the fact that I came from a foreign country with a reserved culture were somehow responsible for my fear. Before the e-mails and comments started pouring in, I’d never really thought about other people’s fear of rejection. But the more people told me how much they could relate to my experience, the more I realized that fear of rejection wasn’t a rare disease at all. It was a normal human condition.
I knew from experience that this fear can have enormous, debilitating consequences. Now I was hearing from people who, like me, viewed rejection as something so painful, so personal, and so negative that they would rather not ask for things, rather conform to the norm, and rather not take risks just to avoid the possibility of rejection. Like me, they had spent much of their lives rejecting themselves before others could get the chance. As a result, they had heartbreaking stories of ambitions that weren’t fulfilled, job opportunities that were missed, love that was never realized—and inventions that were never made or were made by someone else. The worst part is that the “what ifs” that lingered in their minds were often caused by themselves, because they didn’t even ask or didn’t even try.
I once read a poignant memoir, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, written by an Australian nurse named Bronnie Ware. She had interviewed dozens of terminally ill patients in hospice care and asked them about their deepest regrets. The most frequent response she received was: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
What if we all had that courage? What if people didn’t feel so trapped by their fear of rejection? What if rejection didn’t feel so shameful and personal, but became more discussable? And what if we were able not just to talk about it, but to really figure out a way to conquer it?
If a person who fears rejection were suddenly unafraid of it, what might she be capable of? Wouldn’t she be better at everything she does? If she were an artist or musician and didn’t fear how people received her work, wouldn’t she be able to search deep into her soul and make pieces that truly reflect who she is? If she were a salesperson, wouldn’t she be able to call more prospects, follow up with more clients, and not get discouraged after a couple of nos? If she were a parent, wouldn’t she be able to raise her children based on her principles rather than giving them whatever they wanted? Wouldn’t a company or a nonprofit organization that didn’t feel overly worried about shareholder reactions have the courage to innovate new products and services that could make the world a better place?
All my life, I’d wanted to be an entrepreneur. I’d wanted to invent something that millions of people would find useful. Yet by tackling one of my own needs head-on, I’d accidentally stumbled on a need so great that it was shared by most of the planet.
Paul Graham, the entrepreneur and founder of the famous start-up accelerator Y Combinator, once wrote: “The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.” All this time, I’d been focused on launching an app based on a cool idea in my head. But now, I saw far more meaning in helping people overcome their fear of rejection. I didn’t know exactly what that would look like—or what it would mean for my own future—but the rest of my 100 Days of Rejection would be the perfect lab for me to experiment with a new kind of invention: a way to overcome the fear of rejection.
Reading the e-mails from Mike, Regina, and others had put my sudden blast of fame in perspective. When my plane landed in Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, I hurried down the aisle, eager to get back to my family and tell them about my decision. As I stepped out of the plane and into the tunnel, feeling the cold wind, I felt just like I had on my first day of college, when I’d walked across that vast field of untouched snow. Circumstances had just presented me with one of the greatest opportunities of my life. Everything felt new. Everything felt possible.
CHAPTER 4
BATTLING EVOLUTION
Making the decision to stop building my app and completely change direction wasn’t easy, especially considering what I’d given up for that project and how much I valued my team. But when I told them the news, they were incredibly supportive. Like me, they’d been amazed by the amount of publicity and traction my blog had received, and they agreed that I’d stumbled on an even more meaningful endeavor. They felt like they’d contributed to it in a roundabout way and were very proud of it. We agreed that if I ever wanted to build technology related to the “rejection problem,” we would come back to work together again.
But now I had a new day job: confronting rejection full-time.
Immediately, it became clear to me that if I was really going to take on rejection on behalf of the world, then I needed to supplement my rejection attempts with good old-fashioned research and learn as much about the topic as possible. I wanted to study this particular Goliath the way a sports team analyzes its opponent—by doing the equivalent of watching game tape, reading scouting reports, and practicing as much as I could before the real match.
My first online searches turned up almost nothing useful—mostly a swarm of inspirational quotes and superficial rah-rah talks by sales coaches and self-help gurus. Compared to related topics like success, charisma, leadership, negotiation, and even failure, I could find almost nothing that helped explain the subject of rejection and its relationship to our daily lives. What I found instead was a lot of advice that basically boiled down to this:
1. Rejection happens.
2. Don’t take it personally.
3. Be tough and move on.
Well, sure—it would be great if everybody could operate that way. Our mainstream views on how to handle rejection are breathtakingly simplistic. Despite its prevalence and gut-wrenching consequence, we treat rejection as a one-off occurrence or temporary inconvenience—more like a bug bite or a flat tire than an experience that can shut down a person’s ability to take risks forever. It’s as if the subject were so simple that there was no need for more understanding. Didn’t get the job or promotion? Couldn’t close the sale? People thought your idea was stupid? The woman you love turns down your proposal? Don’t take it personally! Dust yourself off and move on!
But if handling rejection were really that simple, why would a tabulation of Google search keywords, generated by billions of users, show that people rank rejection close to the top of their list of greatest fears, even above pain, loneliness, and illness? Why would people feel compelled to live up to others’ expectations while ignoring their own, making failure to pursue their dreams one of their biggest regrets? Why would I bury the blueprints for my shoe-skate invention in the bottom of a drawer after my uncle scoffed at the idea, only to later witness Heelys’s wild success?
Was I just weak? I didn’t think so. I had traveled to a foreign country alone as a teenager, knowing absolutely nobody and speaking no English. I’d had to overcome all kinds of obstacles to learn a new language and become familiar with a new culture. I had worked hard to get where I was, against big odds. If I were weak, I probably would have headed back to China years ago, having put my entire dream of living and working in America into a drawer.
The thousands of people all over the world writing to me, expressing how much they feared rejection, couldn’t be described as weak either. Experiencing a devastating rejection, such as losing a job you’ve held for decades, getting passed up for a promotion, or having your spouse push for a divorce when you don’t want to quit the marriage can be life altering. For people in these situations, saying “don’t take it personally” can feel insulting and ridiculous. But why does it bother us so much? The more I thought about it, the more I realized I really had three burning questions: Why don’t we talk about rejection more? Why is rejection so painful? And why do we fear rejection so much?
There had to be more to it than what my searches were telling me. Figuring that there must be better advice and wisdom out there, I kept looking for answers. I explored the fields of business, psychology, history, sociology, self-help, and behavioral economics for any insights I could find—to the point of obsession. After a few weeks of research, with my desk now piled high with books and articles and my in-box flooded with Google News Alerts on the subject of “rejection,” I had taken tons of notes and was starting to feel like I was a professor in the school of rejection.
REJECTION VS. FAILURE
Maybe the biggest reason people don’t talk about rejection more is because they’d rather discuss its easier-to-manage conceptual cousin—failure. So many times, I’d start reading about rejection only to watch the text slide into a discussion of failure instead. But they aren’t the same thing. When we fail at something, such as a business venture or a career, it feels unfortunate but understandable and often tolerable, because it could be due to a host of factors. It’s easy to come up with reasons why something failed, whether they are logical reasons or simply excuses. If you fail at a business venture, you could reason that the idea was ahead of its time, that the market or the economy wasn’t conducive to success, or that the idea wasn’t well executed.
Even if it was your fault, there are all sorts of ways to turn failure into a positive. You could say “I simply wasn’t good at it,” vow to get better, or remind yourself of the thousands of other things you’re amazing at. You could say “I made some mistakes”—because, after all, who doesn’t? You could say “I learned a lot from this” and come out actually feeling better, more experienced, and wiser than before you failed. In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs sometimes even wear their failures like badges of honor. The entire lean start-up movement was built on the concept of developing products by failing fast and learning from those failures.
In fact, entrepreneurs love to tell and hear stories about failure—because those letdowns are often stepping-stones toward eventual success. Business celebrities such as Donald Trump brag about having failed plenty before becoming the moguls they are today. We watch athletes and sports teams fail one week or one season only to triumph the next. Failure has almost become a prerequisite to success. In some cases, it could feel as cool as having street cred.
Rejection, on the other hand, is not cool at all. It involves another person saying no to us, often in favor of someone else, and often face-to-face. Rejection means that we wanted someone to believe in us but they didn’t; that we wanted someone to like us but they didn’t; we wanted them to see what we see and to think how we think—and instead they disagreed and judged our way of looking at the world as inferior. That feels deeply personal to a lot of us. It doesn’t just feel like a rejection of our request, but also of our character, looks, ability, intelligence, personality, culture, or beliefs. Even if the person rejecting our request doesn’t mean for his or her no to feel personal, it’s going to. Rejection is an inherently unequal exchange between the rejector and the rejectee—and it affects the latter much more than it does the former.
When we experience rejection, we can’t easily blame the economy, the market, or other people. If we can’t deal with it in a healthy manner, we are left with two unhealthy choices. If we believe we deserved the rejection, we blame ourselves and get flooded with feelings of shame and ineptitude. If we believe the rejection is unjust or undeserved, we blame the other person and get consumed by feelings of anger and revenge.
Kevin Carlsmith, PhD, a social psychologist at Colgate University, set up lab experiments where the participants experienced a perceived injustice. Some of the individuals were given the choice to reap revenge on their wrongdoers, but others were not. Afterward, Carlsmith surveyed participants’ feelings. Everyone who was given the chance to exact revenge took it. But everyone in the revenge group ended up feeling worse than the people who weren’t given the choice. Interestingly, all the members of the no-revenge-choice group believed they would have felt better had they been given the chance to get back at their wrongdoers.
; In other words, people naturally want revenge after they’ve been rejected, perhaps thinking that they will feel better by showing the rejectors how wrong they were. Yet it doesn’t work that way, and those who lash out actually wind up feeling worse when they get revenge. This is just a small window into human nature in a safe lab environment. Yet in real life, we are inundated with unfortunate and even tragic incidences of school shooting and acid attacks, all due to people’s desire for revenge after rejection.
THE PAIN OF REJECTION
A few years ago, my wife, Tracy, and I took a fall trip to Italy. We’d been planning the trip for years, and it was supposed to be our dream vacation. Instead, two days into it, we had one of the worst vacation days we could imagine.
First, we got bad directions to the Colosseum and got hopelessly lost. Because of that miscue, we missed our bus to the countryside and had to scrap the idyllic daytrip we’d meticulously planned. Soon after, a street thug stole our camera—and with it, all our vacation pictures. It was as if the country of Italy had held a national conference before our arrival, at which the attendees devised ways to ruin our vacation.
It was after dusk, and we were walking back to our hotel, feeling exhausted and in terrible moods. Suddenly, Tracy bent forward and started wincing. For years, she’d had bouts of chronic stomach pain. The one she was experiencing now, in the middle of an Italian street, left her feeling like she was being stabbed. We didn’t have any medicine with us and needed to buy some—as soon as possible. But we didn’t know where to find it, or a single word of Italian.
It was 8:50 P.M., and most stores in Rome close at 9 P.M. We hurried to a nearby magazine stand. Luckily, it was still open. We hoped the person who worked at the stand could give us directions to the closest convenience store, supermarket, or shop that sold medicine.